


vox humana

by Alias (anafabula)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Banned Together Bingo 2020, Consensual Blood Drinking, Established Relationship, M/M, Possessive Behavior, Power Dynamics, Rough Kissing, Vampire Blood is a Mind-Altering Substance, in the ‘Entities but also sexier bloodsuckers’ sense, it’s a season 3 snippet of some kind of extra urban fantasy AU, mild blood kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:14:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27708860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: And there’s no safe way to kiss a vampire, obviously, no way that isn’t just stupidly dangerous to do what Jon is doing now in particular—
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 6
Kudos: 56
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	vox humana

**Author's Note:**

> That thing where I try to find closure for AUs that had an absurd amount of thought behind the chunk actually written, feat. prompt `Dangerous Lifestyle`.

Without the sudden shock heat of recent feeding, Jon finds it’s actually fairly difficult for him to tell whether Elias is getting warmer from contact or Jon’s just losing body heat. His breath’s above room temperature, certainly, where it’s ghosting over Jon’s skin, and his hands aren’t so cold as to bring up gooseflesh against his palms, but there’s still such a lacking base of reference that…

It occurs to Jon with no small amount of amusement that this entire train of thought is a testament to how long Elias has had him pressed bodily against the wall and not done anything about it, apparently transfixed for some obscure vampire reason or other just by leaning his face into Jon’s neck and—obviously Jon’s got to needle him, really, given the opportunity to get a word in edgewise what else _could_ Jon do?

“So I’d been meaning to ask,” he says, and feels Elias’s attention honed on him immediately though all the more physical sharp edges stay strictly controlled (and maybe that’s part of it, too, proving he _can_ do this, leave just his slightly-parted lips where the skin of Jon’s throat is thinnest and rest the pads of his fingers against the edge of Jon’s ribcage so his own bones are the sharpest thing involved, and, all right, maybe that’s got more to do with Jon’s reaction than he’d strictly like to admit), “but…”

“ _What_ ,” Elias says, doesn’t quite snap, with another infinitesimal physical shift in his attention. It’s not even undercut by his half-distracted mouthing at the side of Jon’s neck, which is frankly unfair.

Jon considers his options as far as things that are both strictly true and certain to be aggravating go. There’s far more than he can hold in his mind at once, actually, right now, because they’re close enough to of a height that it’s… _distracting_ , really, even if Elias isn’t moving and seems to be processing something Jon doesn’t get to be aware of for there to be this nearly uninterrupted line of simple awareness of his own body. (And also that he can’t… move, really, hasn’t tried to but also has little enough space in which to try…) After an embarrassing loss of momentum he manages, and _does_ make it solidly wry at least, “You only want me because I’m the Archivist, don’t you.”

Elias makes a mostly subvocal sound of general irritation Jon both knows is relatively mild and something he would have been justifiably alarmed by a year or two ago, and nips at Jon’s jaw, chastising probably, lips pulled over his own teeth enough to bring it down to human. This is also distracting, such that Jon doesn’t quite track exactly how one of the hands Elias’d had shoved up under Jon’s shirt makes it to the small of his back instead when the other’s at his jaw, tilting his face as his spine arcs agreeably and he drags one hand up Elias’s shoulder for some semblance of balance. It occurs to him, very belatedly, that ‘piss off my vampire boss but not too much’ is itself a fairly ludicrous goal.

And he does look angry, albeit in the ways Jon tentatively associates with Elias when he’s not doing anything else with his face and has been forced to actually search for words: sharp, not malicious, and very far away.

He does speak before Jon’s settled on how to aggrieve him further as needed; he’s extremely exacting about it. “ _My_ Archivist,” he says, and Jon watches him tongue over his own teeth for just a moment and then it’s probably Jon’s own fault for having his mouth open while he looked for more snark that Elias is kissing him.

Here, too, it turns out Elias has remarkably precise control over his own teeth, which Jon doesn’t fully expect; it’s not exactly a statement he could make about otherwise similar instances he could think of. _Could_ being perhaps the operative word, as in it’s currently largely beyond him, when the majority of his more distantly sober thinking about the situation is spent on keeping one hand flat against the wall behind him, the flat and solid knowing that there are other anchors here. Beyond that Jon’s about as lost as he was always going to be, other fist tight in Elias’s shirtsleeve as Jon entirely fails at not making small emphatic noises into his mouth. He lets himself be kissed far more than he manages to actually kiss back, just yielding and taking and _really_ Jon should neither be surprised nor embarrassed but the irresistibility of that framework and its subtext still brings him up to a guilty, startled whine.

And another when Elias’s guiding hand moves to the nape of Jon’s neck, fingers playing into the hair at the base of his skull and thumb at the hinge of his jaw, and Jon stays confused at first before realizing what Elias is wordlessly coaxing him toward is the taste of what must be Elias’s own blood on his teeth, not overpowering in flavor but very much so as an experience synonymous with the realization he’d bitten his own lips open when making such a point of not breaking Jon’s skin. And then Jon has to follow it as a matter of principle taking precedence far before any question of desire (not that it at all conflicts with the latter; the increasingly needy noises he finds himself bereft of the focus not to make are proof enough of _that_ ), because he doesn’t understand, not quite, not enough.

There’s fine, raw wounds not quite healed where Elias’s teeth had sat against his own lips, relatively warm and vulnerable enough to get a stifled gasp when Jon’s inspecting them with his tongue, and the flavor that goes with them and inside his mouth but most of all still traced on his teeth. And there’s no safe way to kiss a vampire, obviously, no way that isn’t just stupidly dangerous to do what Jon is doing now in particular, even if he were entirely lucid as opposed to knowingly chasing the hot bright electric static of Elias’s blood in even trace amounts, the molten, heavy feeling it sends down Jon’s spine, but damn it, he—

It’s no small amount of gratifying that Elias seems to have trouble, for his own sake, drawing Jon back; that he’s breathing actively and uneven and his pupils are dilated enough that on eyes acclimated for night vision above all Jon expects it actually hurts. Still better off than Jon, naturally—who’s too interested to control his own voice, who does note how it feels when he strains for a moment against Elias’s leverage on his hair and feels more than hears his own lips pant for a wounded noise Jon would not ever have expected to hear himself make willingly—but Jon’s fairly used to that. He can still enjoy watching Elias struggle briefly to reassemble his ordinary pretentiousness for its own sake.

After a moment Elias does sigh and say, even and weary and utterly at odds with his significantly more affected appearance, “I take some issue with the premise you and the the idea of the Archivist are in any way separable, Jon, and at this point I know you know better as well.”

Jon doesn’t so much let that roll off him as record the argument for later. It’s one that has a long, long life ahead of it, while Jon’s attention’s fully arrested by the present novelty. He swallows and feels (aside from Elias watching, and how that brings even more of a flush up to Jon’s face, like he’d been at all lacking in that particular department) how the taste on his tongue changes but doesn’t truly go away, feels like it’s sunk in between his taste buds, flickering sweet and astringent in turn and pooling dark at the back of his mouth, down his throat, when he swallows.

It doesn’t make _sense,_ but—what in Jon’s life does? At least he can ( _will_ ) make Elias explain this one.

Though his first attempt to ask leaves a bit to be desired. “Not…” Jon fumbles with the words, lips and tongue hot and uncoordinated; has to remind himself he doesn’t _get_ anything more out of this if he doesn’t speak, doesn’t make Elias speak, so the wanting that makes articulation this difficult defeats its own damn point. “Your blood, it’s not human.”

Elias laughs at him for that, the bastard, casually cups the back of Jon’s head more securely in the guise of at all decreasing how distracting he’s being. “I’d expect not,” he says, voice heavy with condescension above all else, “Given…”

“Fuck off,” Jon complains at him. Though annoyance does lend his speech the sharpness it needs to support a question; he disregards context and caveat both, no self-deprecating _Not that I have a great base of reference_ or arch offended academic _It was my understanding that with our base species in common vampires still—_ (It’s not too surprising, all things considered, that Jon was kept from noticing any discrepancy beforehand by how his own blood drowned it out, not to mention other distractions; still, he’s perfectly irritated: by not knowing, by how obnoxiously _appropriate_ it is.) His voice as steady as is viable holding the intersection between snapping and gasping, Jon says, “Elias, do you literally bleed ink?”

This close and this already-compromised he can watch Elias’s eyelids flutter briefly (and, significantly more distracting, his hips jerk just once, which is more than enough to remind Jon of another reason he’s dizzy and gasping and disorientated) before he pulls himself together enough to smirk.

“Yes,” Elias says, with the pride of a personal achievement whose context Jon isn’t yet privy to, “actually. That is exactly the case.”

“What the…” Jon doesn’t know, really, why this gets such disbelief out of him, in the general scheme of things. It’s hardly out of step with the rest of the surreal and supernatural dogging his life—or maybe that’s precisely why, the weird little reminder that it would be an act of normalcy beyond Jon to _just_ have a creepy vampire boss, who he’s fucking, who’s _just_ a murderer, without always the extra layer beyond it. Elias himself seems content to let Jon sputter, maybe aware he can’t actually maintain the full detachment he’d want to mock Jon for being this thrown by something far from urgent or relevant or otherwise hugely unsettling; he’s bent his head back into the crook of Jon’s neck with his mouth open fully this time, teeth a gentle warning scrape over hot vulnerable skin, before Jon manages in force, “ _Why?”_

Apparently Jon also pushes the question much harder than he’d realized, or maybe it’s a function of forcing so much of his power into a single syllable, because Elias’s teeth break the skin on pure reflex, making Jon cry out and press against him as he feels Elias quickly try to strike a compromise between catching the trickle of blood before it's wasted on staining Jon’s shirt and the answering urgency of compulsion. “Fuck,” he murmurs, flush against Jon’s skin, but Jon can hardly find it in himself to regret the results, with Elias trying to speak while still mouthing at Jon’s neck, flats of his teeth angled but ever-present as he tries to capture all the bloodflow from thin, ripped skin while knowing he can’t be silent long enough to seal the wound properly so small as it is it’s just going to stay ragged and keep bleeding—“By the will of our master, Jon, what do you think?”

“Keep—” Jon cranes his neck, feels with no small amount of satisfaction how that pulls the sides of torn skin on his throat further apart, how such a small thing can captivate Elias’s attention so wholly Jon could almost believe himself to have the upper hand. “Keep doing that.” Finds further satisfaction in how the most useful question in the English language is so short, really. “Why, though?”

“Why _what_ , Jon.” Elias’s voice is serrated: ragged under the sharpness. He goes back to laving his tongue over the blood after—and _does_ get all the way up to the original injury, this time, so Jon’s unfortunately aware it won’t be bleeding for long; also, and case in point about the upper hand, all but writhing against him. As such it takes no small amount of effort to pull together the full question, since Elias is apparently set on being difficult about it.

Jon manages, of course. “Why—oh— _Why_ did it do that to you?” I seem to be managing fine more or less human, he thinks; but doesn’t say, because he doesn’t want to give Elias the easy dodge (because he doesn’t want to be told he’s wrong, and isn't sure if he would be, and doesn't want to be unsure, and).

Elias breathes heavily against Jon’s neck. (He’s not entirely sure how that works even normally, why Elias breathes only some of the time, but it’s always faintly gratifying to leave him like this: breath on the cool side but shuddering like he’d been saving it up only to get more than he’d bargained for, like his lungs are necessary and racked with need beyond oxygen and all this by Jon’s doing.) After a moment, during which Elias still opts to run his hand down the other side of Jon’s neck like he just needs to be making Jon’s life harder somehow before he can speak, Elias says, a bit incongruously clipped even, “I am sure it hasn’t escaped your notice that vampirism isn’t typically in our territory.”

“Well,” Jon says. Elias is doing something that makes him squirm a bit—a lot of somethings, maybe, it’s getting a bit hard to keep track of both body and argument or even, if Jon’s honest, so much as one of the two—and it’s not doing even Jon’s obstinacy any favors. “Yes.”

“I had—” There’s something old and no longer angry but still savage in Elias’s voice, and Jon wants to follow up on it, later, feels a hot shivery sense of his own lack of self-preservation instinct ripple over his skin where the words touch now. “Little interest in that being my destiny. Of following any of the naturally available options in that respect, mindlessly or otherwise. It… marked the distinction on me as a result.”

“So you bleed ink,” Jon says. Maybe a bit stupidly, but: _really_. And Elias is being pretentious about it, anyway, even if it’s true.

Elias nips him for it—so there goes Jon’s dignity, there it goes, out his mouth with the too-easily-provoked whine—and says, “Yes. Among other things.”

“Wh—” 

“That’s enough for now, Jon,” Elias says. Pointedly, with a grip on the back of Jon’s neck for emphasis when he’s pulled back to look him over.

There’s a bit of Jon’s blood at the corner of Elias’s mouth but he can’t lean forward to reach. Can’t do much of anything really; as soon as he’s lost the momentum of questioning it turns out Jon should’ve known that’s what was sustaining him. Back to his own devices he’s little more than loose-limbed, warm, and embarrassingly, predictably strung by and paralyzed with want, held up by Elias’s hands on his hip and neck—and his thigh between Jon’s, really, which is _not_ helping Jon’s concentration right now—as much as his own feet. “But I want—”

“I know.”

“Sadist,” Jon complains; not so much before thinking better of it as simultaneous with his doing so. Which is to say he’s advancing some as regards situational awareness, even if it’s not enough to save himself the embarrassment right now.

Elias could get across everything he obviously wants to with just his expression, far beyond what would be put in any kind of risk by Jon’s hazy situational distraction and relative lack of skill in reading such things, but if he were content to simply let the matter rest other than the way he’s looking at Jon right now he presumably wouldn’t be Elias at all. “Well,” he says, with a theatrical kind of consideration, “one would think…” When Jon doesn’t dignify that exercise in self-indulgence with a response, Elias goes on, now a little judgmental, “It doesn’t have to be a negative, Jon.”

“Don’t—” Jon looks away from him, along the wall, but that’s all he can do; even with the thrill ebbing rapidly from his skin and the lassitude being outpaced by his habitual anxieties he’s still distinctly trapped until Elias chooses otherwise. “I don’t need the… I know.” When he looks back front he tries to make it a challenge: a little sardonic, a little outright bitter. “Just let the mortal have his learning curve, all right?”

Elias raises, in order, on the same side of his body: an eyebrow; the corner of his mouth; one hand, up to the side of Jon’s apparently-flushed face. The inhuman strength can be downplayed, and is, as Jon supposed must be habit at this point. The nigh-intolerable gentleness much less so. Elias’s palm is decidedly room-temperature and that’s more than enough reason, Jon tells himself, sternly, to not let himself get carried away again. “Not for long, I think,” Elias says.

His eyes seemed to be very far off, for a moment there, and Jon can’t think of a single useful thing to say.

Maybe he should’ve pushed harder into pissing him off after all. That’s a form of awareness of his mortality Jon is well-acquainted with. He doesn’t know what to do with this. He’s left reeling too hard, when Elias finally and abruptly pulls away, for Jon to be forced to decide on the subject, for now.

There’s no visible mark the next day, to Jon’s vague consternation. He can’t seem to keep his hand off his own neck regardless, no matter how harshly he tries to judge himself about it.


End file.
